i think the social cost of qe in that environment is going to be sufficiently poor, that the fed will step away. >> we're getting these weird cross currents. i'm glad you're here to ask about it. when the fed did it, we thought wow, things are worse than we thought. consumer confidence seems to be improving. the market was doing better. there's a lot of things that look like -- what were you talking about? what was so bad that you saw in this economy? but again, the transportation average is now down for the year. china looks worse than it was. are we entering a -- are we doing okay and accelerating in terms of growth, or are we slowing down again? >> i think there's probably three things that feed into it. first the transition mechanism wasn't working. people were instead of going out and buying risk assets and investigating companies, they were buying bonds in anticipation of the fed buying so. the operation twist was flattening the yield curve and trap iping liquidity there. i think the fact fact was constantly giving fixed numbers and fixed dates gives the market something to focu